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Congress wants entrepreneurs to go to restaurants and apply for a full tax deduction.

Whether it is enough to save contested restaurants is a different story, said financial advisors and tax professionals.

The $ 900 billion proposal, which was released Monday and is 5,593 pages long, contains a number of relief efforts designed to get Americans through the pandemic.

The measure includes US $ 600 stimulus checks for adults and children and a US $ 300 weekly increase in unemployment.

The legislation also encourages entrepreneurs to encourage restaurants through frequent visits.

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Indeed, the bill provides a “temporary full allowance for business lunches” and applies to the cost of food or beverages provided by a restaurant and paid for or incurred in 2021 and 2022.

“As you know, the President is concerned about restaurants, so we have restored business dining deductibility,” Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Monday morning.

Currently there is a 50% deduction for meals and snacks at work and meals for customers when doing business.

If the measure sounds familiar to you, it is likely because you have already seen it. The HEALS Act, a previous Senate discharge proposal, required a temporary 100% deduction on business meals.

This move was advocated by Senator Tim Scott, RS.C., and was known as the Supporting America’s Restaurant Workers Act.

“It’s great for small businesses and restaurants. They really need that shot in the arm,” said Michael Goodman, certified financial planner and CPA with Wealthstream Advisors in New York.

“Unfortunately, it won’t help right now as it’s for 2021 and 2022,” he said. “It won’t do anything for those restaurants that have to go out of business.”

Meet restaurants

The proposal comes at a difficult time for the hospitality industry. Restaurants lost 17,400 jobs in November.

In the meantime, municipalities lock up while Covid cases resurrect.

That means indoor eating is banned in New York City, while outdoor seating at restaurants and breweries in Los Angeles County is closed to the public.

Tax professionals are also skeptical about whether or not business owners want to take the risk of a meal – especially at a time when their own finances are already suffering.

“The three-martini lunch is a great idea in theory, but you expect people to have money to spend,” said CFP Dan Herron, CPA and director of Elemental Wealth Advisors in San Luis Obispo, California.

“It’s great for wealthy people who can blast money through a business, but I know people who struggle to make ends meet,” he said. “Your priority is not a three-martini lunch.”

Dr. Scott Gottlieb emphasized the importance of getting as many people as possible vaccinated and warned of a potentially bad spring and summer without protective immunity, as new variants of Covid are emerging worldwide.

“If we can’t achieve more protective immunity among the population, we could face a situation where we have some kind of continuous infection in the spring and summer as those variants take hold here,” said the former FDA chief in the Trump- Administration in an interview on CNBC’s “The News with Shepard Smith” Thursday evening.

Ohio State researchers found a new strain of Covid in the United States with mutations that scientists had not seen before. They also revealed that they had found a different strain identical to the highly communicable one from the UK. The researchers say these mutations “likely make the virus more contagious”.

Gottlieb warned that the variants could turn a relatively quiet spring and summer into a summer when we have more infections because these variants are now in circulation and spread more easily even in the warm months when we shouldn’t . I didn’t spread a lot of coronavirus. “

Long-time professor at Harvard University, Dr. David Edwards, echoed Gottlieb’s views on the timing and importance of an effective vaccine rollout.

“Time is of course important when facing an organism,” said Edwards, founder of FEND, a nasal hygiene mist developed for the coronavirus pandemic. “Our main goal this winter should still be to vaccinate as many people as possible with the very powerful vaccines we have today.”

The U.S. has distributed 30.6 million vaccines and placed 11 million of them in the arms of the people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, an ensemble forecast compiled by the CDC predicted an additional 92,000 Americans will die from Covid in the next three weeks.

The United States has suffered 8,400 deaths in the past two days and nearly 40,000 deaths in less than two weeks of 2021, according to a CNBC analysis of Johns Hopkins data. The pandemic kills an average of more than 3,300 Americans a day.

Gottlieb told host Shepard Smith that he was “encouraged” and “confident” by Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose vaccine that the company can scale its manufacturing to support the introduction of Covid vaccines in the US

“The early data looked encouraging,” said Gottlieb. “One of the things we saw in the data was that the antibody response continued to rise even after about two and a half months.”

Disclosure: Scott Gottlieb is a CNBC employee and a member of the boards of directors of Pfizer, the genetic testing startup Tempus, and the biotech company Illumina. Pfizer has signed a manufacturing agreement with Gilead to manufacture Remdesivir. Gottlieb is also co-chair of Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings and Royal Caribbean’s Healthy Sail Panel.

A man wearing a face mask rides a bicycle as a novel coronavirus outbreak struck the country on February 12, 2020 in Beijing, China.

Carlos Garcia | Reuters

BEIJING – China is expanding support measures for the country’s smallest businesses, a signal that full economic recovery from the shock of the coronavirus pandemic is still fraught with uncertainties.

The central government announced a series of measures to support the economy during the height of the domestic outbreak, particularly loans for smaller, privately owned businesses. These companies contribute most of the growth and employment in China, but often find it more difficult than state-owned companies to obtain loans from banks, which are also primarily state-owned.

China’s top executive, the State Council, announced late Tuesday that small and small businesses could postpone loan repayment as needed after the first quarter of next year. According to a government statement, banks that provide government aid to these small businesses for 40% of those loans will now be able to maintain that support beyond the end of this year.

“Right now the economy is gradually returning to normal, but more support is still needed as manufacturing and operating small and small businesses face unique challenges,” a CNBC translation of the Chinese text reads. Authorities found that previous guidelines have helped more than 3.1 million small businesses.

The fact that the government must set these guidelines shows that there are still challenges in the economy, said Nicholas Zhu, vice president and senior credit officer at Moody’s Investor Service.

After Covid-19 surfaced in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year, authorities closed more than half the country in February to control the outbreak. GDP declined 6.8% in the first quarter before returning to growth in the second quarter.

China’s gross domestic product grew by 0.7% in the first three quarters of the year. This made the country the only major economy to expand this year after the pandemic.

The official, though highly doubted, urban unemployment rate fell to 5.2% in November, which is the same as in the same period last year.

China has not seen major bankruptcies this year and most of the people are still employed, said Liu Xiangdong, deputy director of the economic research division at the Beijing-based China Center for International Economic Exchanges.

“But there are still uncertainties for small, medium and small businesses. If the economy turns, they can’t keep up,” Liu said, according to a CNBC translation of his Mandarin remarks.

He noted that the smallest companies are in the service industry, which has been recovering from the pandemic longer.

Sporadic cases in various cities since the domestic outbreak broke out in March have resulted in mass tests or occasional renewals of restrictions on business, primarily affecting consumers and services. Many people spend less given the uncertainty about income. At the end of November retail sales were down 4.8% year-on-year.

More risks for Chinese banks

According to analysts, the question is when authorities should appropriately lift economic support, especially given the ongoing spread of the coronavirus in the US, UK and Europe.

Last week, at an annual meeting to set development priorities for the coming year, Chinese leaders were generally optimistic, but noted that the economic recovery was not fully intact and support would not suddenly change.

Government policies this year have helped, albeit not dramatically, said Zhu. The vast majority of small businesses failed to take advantage of the deferred repayment policy, he said, citing Moody’s conversations with banks.

Because of this increased stake in smaller, typically riskier companies, Moody’s has negative outlook for Chinese banks given the risk of default and the high number of new bad or bad loans.